Sunday, November 11, 2012

One of
the voyage accounts I read while writing my novel To the Fair Land was The
Adventures of Mark Moore: late an officer in the British Navy (1795).* Moore
combined a naval career in British, American, Tuscan, Portuguese and Swedish
services with a career in the theatre as an actor manager, touring Britain,
France and Flanders. His was a rackety, wandering life which zigzagged between
the sea and the stage, and from prosperity to bankruptcy.

Moore was
born in Boston, America in 1739. His father had emigrated from Ireland and was
a wine merchant. He died when Moore was three. When the boy was thirteen he was
sent to near-by Cambridge to study. “I did not waste much of the midnight oil,”
he confessed. He was much more interested in spending time with Hallam’s
theatrical company which was touring in Rhodes Island. Stage-struck, Moore ran
away to join the company when they went to Barbados.

Hallam’s
company, founded by Lewis Hallam (1714-1756) and his wife (?-1773), was the
first notable acting company to tour in North America. Lewis Hallam came from a
family of actors. His mother was an actress and his elder brother ran a theatre
in Goodman’s Fields. The Hallams formed the London Company of Comedians in
1752, and set sail for the British colonies in the same year. Lewis Hallam died
in 1754 on a trip to Jamaica and his wife married David Douglass, who took over
the company and took it back to New York in 1758, as the American Company
Troupe.

A family
friend’s attempt to persuade Moore to go home met with refusal, but the young
man did agree to enter the Navy as a midshipman. He was injured in an
engagement with a French privateer. His skull was fractured and trepanned – the
ship’s surgeon drilled a hole in the bone so that the wound could be cleaned. Though
he was forbidden alcohol after the operation, he credited his recovery to the
punch he persuaded a marine to smuggle in to him.

Moore’s sea-going
career went on to include a spell in a privateer as a surgeon’s mate, when he discovered
that the surgeon had no more medical experience than he did himself. The
surgeon had been a wood-cutter, and two men bled to death when he attempted to carry out amputations. Moore
later did a stint on a Bristol slaver as ship’s surgeon – his only qualification
being this time as surgeon’s mate to the wood-cutter. Moore threw his own slave, who he called Ranger, overboard after the boy was shot
in the stomach to spare him, he said, a tormenting death. Moore records that Ranger
was “kissing his feet at his last moments”. For a time Moore operated as an
American privateer harrying British ships, for which he was taken prisoner. In
the 1790s he worked for the British Navy again, transporting pressed men.

His
equally chequered theatrical career was resumed after his marriage to his first
wife who he met at a ball in Worcester. They eloped the next day. The couple embarked
on a wandering theatrical career throughout the UK. For a time they toured the
west country performing Italian songs, calling themselves Signora and Signor
Morini. They had one son who joined the French army and died at about the same
time as Mrs Moore.

Moore
saw the inside of a prison on more than one occasion. In the Midlands he was
mistaken for a highwayman and arrested. In 1793, shortly after his second marriage
to the landlady of his Liverpool lodgings, he ended up in debtors’ prison where
he survived by making and selling model ships. He was in prison for seven months
and eventually discharged. Back in Liverpool, with old age and poverty staring
him in the face, Moore wrote his autobiography in the belief that “a British
audience, and British readers, never fail to pardon, even where they cannot praise”.

Moore’s
narrative is interspersed with songs, Latin verses, a translation from a French
novel and topographical information. There’s theatrical gossip, with some name
dropping thrown in – Garrick, Linley,
Sheridan. A “Russian anecdote” tells the story of how Peter the Great disguised
himself and joined a gang of rebels to foil their plot to assassinate him. How many
of Moore’s stories are true, how many are tall, and how many are seaman’s yarns,
it is impossible to say!

*I wrote
about another American mariner, Aaron Thomas, in “A Crude and Cruel Age” on 4
June 2012.

T

he Memoirs and
Adventures of Mark Moore, Late an Officer in the British Navy, Written by
Himself (London, 1795)

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About Me

I live in Bristol and I write historical fiction and non-fiction. In 2006 I completed an MA in English Literature with the Open University, specialising in eighteenth century literature.
My historical novels are set in the eighteenth century. To date they are: To The Fair Land (2012); and the Dan Foster Mystery Series comprising Bloodie Bones (2015), The Fatal Coin (2017) and The Butcher’s Block (2017). Bloodie Bones was a winner of the Historical Novel Society Indie Award 2016 and a semi-finalist for the M M Bennetts Historical Fiction Award 2016.
The Bristol Suffragettes (non-fiction), a history of the suffragette campaign in Bristol and the south west which includes a fold-out map and walk, was published in 2013.